Shantaram: A Novel

by Gregory David Roberts

  ‘Yeah, maybe,’ she murmured. Something of the old mischief and mystery flared in her eyes.

  ‘And you’re sure it’s him?’

  ‘Sure enough to go there myself,’ she answered, looking at me once more.

  ‘Do you know where he is—now, I mean?’

  ‘Not exactly, but I think I know where he’s going.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Varanasi. Khaderbhai’s teacher, Idriss, lives there. He’s very old now, but he still teaches there.’

  ‘Khaderbhai’s teacher?’ I asked, stunned to think that in all the hundreds of hours I’d spent with Khader, listening to his philosophy lectures, he’d never mentioned the name.

  ‘Yes. I met him once, right at the start, when I first came to India, with Khader. I was … I don’t know … I guess you’d call it a nervous breakdown. There was this plane, going to Singapore. I don’t even know how I got on it. And I broke down—just, kind of, cracked up. And Khader, he was on the same plane. And he put his arm around me. I told him everything … absolutely … everything. And next thing, I’m in this cave with a giant Buddha statue and this teacher named Idriss—Khader’s teacher.’

  There was a pause while she let those memories pull her into the past, but then she shook herself free, and back into the moment.

  ‘I think that’s where Khaled is going—to see Idriss. The old guru fascinated him. He was obsessed about meeting him. I don’t know why he never got around to it then, but I think that’s where he’s headed now. Or maybe he’s already there. He used to ask me about him all the time. Idriss taught Khader everything he knew about Resolution theory, and—’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Resolution theory. That’s what Khader called it, but he said it was Idriss who gave it that name. It was his philosophy of life, Khader’s philosophy, about how the universe is always moving toward—’

  ‘Complexity,’ I interrupted. ‘I know. I talked about it a lot with him. But he never called it Resolution theory. And he never talked about Idriss.’

  ‘That’s funny, because I think he loved Idriss, you know, like a father. Once, he called him the teacher of all teachers. And I know he wanted to retire up there, not far from Varanasi, with Idriss. Anyway, that’s where I’m going to start looking for Khaled.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘O-kay,’ I responded, avoiding her eyes. ‘Is this … is this anything to do with … well, you and Khaled, from before?’

  ‘You can be such a fuck sometimes, Lin, you know that?’

  I looked up sharply, but I didn’t respond.

  ‘Did you know Ulla’s in town?’ she asked after a while.

  ‘No. When did she get in? Have you seen her?’

  ‘That’s just it. I got a message from her. She was at the President, and she wanted to see me right away.’

  ‘Did you go?’

  ‘I didn’t want to,’ she mused. ‘If you got the message, would you have gone?’

  ‘I guess,’ I answered, staring out at the bay where moonlight crested on the serpent curves of a gently rolling sea. ‘But not for her. For Modena. I saw him a while ago. He’s still nuts about her.’

  ‘I saw him tonight,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Yes. Just before. With her. It freaked me out. I went to the hotel and up to her room. There was another guy there, a guy named Ramesh—’

  ‘Modena told me about him. They’re friends.’

  ‘So, he opens the door, and I walk in, and I see Ulla, sitting on the bed, resting her back against the wall. And Modena, he’s lying across her legs, with his head back near her shoulder. That face …’

  ‘I know. It’s a hell of a mess.’

  ‘It was weird. It was freaking me out, the whole scene. I’m not sure why. And Ulla, she tells me she inherited a lot of money from her father—they’re very rich, you know, Ulla’s family. They practically own the town in Germany where she was born, but they cut her off cold when she was heavy into drugs. She never got a thing from them for years—not until her father died. So when she inherited the money, she got this idea to come back and look for Modena. She felt guilty, she said, and she couldn’t live with herself. And she found him. He was waiting for her. And they were together, when I went to see her, like some … some kind of a love story.’

  ‘Damn, if he wasn’t right about her,’ I said softly. ‘He told me—he knew she’d come back for him, and she really did. I never believed it for a second. I thought he was just crazy.’

  ‘The way they were sitting together, with him across her legs. You know the Pieta? Michelangelo? It looked exactly like that. It was so strange. It really shook me up. Some things are so weird they make you angry, you know?’

  ‘What did she want?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Why did she call you to the hotel?’

  ‘Oh, I get it,’ she said, with a little smile. ‘Ulla always wants something.’

  I raised an eyebrow, returning her stare, but said nothing.

  ‘She wanted me to arrange a passport for Modena. He’s been here for years. He’s an overstayer. And he’s got a few problems with the Spanish police, under his own name. He needs a new passport to get back into Europe. He could pass for Italian. Or maybe Portuguese.’

  ‘Leave it to me,’ I said calmly, thinking that I knew the reason, at last, why she’d asked me to meet with her. ‘I’ll get on it tomorrow. I know how to get in touch with him, for photos and whatever—although there’d be no mistaking his face at a customs check. I’ll fix it.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, meeting my eyes with such fervent intensity that my heart began to beat hard against my chest. It is always a fool’s mistake, Didier once said to me, to be alone with someone you shouldn’t have loved. ‘What are you doing, Lin?’

  ‘Sitting here with you,’ I replied, smiling.

  ‘No, I mean, what are you going to do? Are you going to stay in Bombay?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I was going to ask you … if you want to come with me, to find Khaled.’

  I laughed, but she didn’t laugh with me.

  ‘That’s the second-best offer I’ve had today.’

  ‘The second best?’ she drawled. ‘What was the first?’

  ‘Someone invited me to go to the war, in Sri Lanka.’

  She clamped her lips tightly around an angry response, but I held my hands up in surrender, and spoke quickly.

  ‘I’m just kidding, Karla, just kidding. Take it easy. I mean, it’s true about the invitation to go to Sri Lanka, but I’m just … you know.’

  She relaxed, smiling again.

  ‘I’m out of practice. It’s been a long time, Lin.’

  ‘So … why the invitation now?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘That’s not good enough, Karla, and you know it.’

  ‘Okay,’ she sighed, glancing at me and then looking away to follow the breeze weaving wave-patterns on the sand. ‘I guess I was hoping to find something like … like what we had in Goa.’

  ‘What about … Jeet?’ I asked, ignoring the opening she’d given me. ‘How does he feel about you going off to find Khaled?’

  ‘We lead separate lives. We do what we want. We go where we want.’

  ‘Sounds … breezy,’ I offered, struggling to find a word that wasn’t a lie, but wouldn’t offend. ‘Didier made it sound more serious than that—told me the guy asked you to marry him.’

  ‘He did,’ she said flatly.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘And will you—marry him, I mean?’

  ‘Yes. I think I will.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Don’t start that again.’

  ‘Sorry’ she said, sighing through a tired smile. ‘I’ve been running with a different crowd. Why marry Jeet? He’s a nice guy, he’s healthy, and he’s loaded. And, hey, I think I’ll do a better job of spendin
g his money than he does.’

  ‘So what you’re telling me is that you’re ready to die for this love.’

  She laughed and then turned to me, suddenly serious again. Her eyes, pale with moonlight; her eyes, the green of water lilies after the rain; her long hair, black as forest river stones; her hair that was like holding the night itself in the wrap of my fingers; her lips, starred with incandescent light; lips of camellia-petal softness warmed with secret whispers. Beautiful. And I loved her. I loved her still so much, so hard, but with no heat or heart at all. That falling love, that helpless, dreaming, soaring love, was gone. And I suddenly knew in those seconds of … cold adoration, I suppose … that the power she’d once held over me was also gone. Or, more than that, her power had moved into me, and had become mine. I held all the cards. And then I wanted to know. It wasn’t good enough to just accept what had happened between us. I wanted to know everything.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me, Karla?’

  She gave an anguished little sigh, and stretched her legs out to bury her bare feet in the sand. Watching the small cascades of soft sand spill over her moving feet, she spoke in a dull, flat tone, as if she was composing a letter—or recalling a letter, perhaps, that she’d written once and never sent to me.

  ‘I knew you were going to ask me, and I think that’s why I’ve waited so long to get in touch with you. I let people know that I was around, and I asked after you, but I didn’t do anything, until today, because … I knew you’d ask me.’

  ‘If it makes it any easier,’ I interrupted, sounding harder than I’d intended, ‘I know you burned down Madame Zhou’s place—’

  ‘Did Ghani tell you that?’

  ‘Ghani? No. I figured that one out myself.’

  ‘Ghani did it for me—he arranged it. That was the last time I spoke to him.’

  ‘The last time I spoke to him was about an hour before he died.’

  ‘Did he tell you anything about her?’ she asked, perhaps hoping that there were some parts of it she wouldn’t have to tell me.

  ‘About Madame Zhou? No. He didn’t say a word.’

  ‘He told me … a lot,’ she sighed. ‘He filled in a few gaps. I think it was Ghani who tipped me over the edge with her. He told me she had Rajan following you, and she only pulled her strings with the cops to get you arrested when Rajan told her you made love to me. I always hated her, but that did it. I just … it was one thing too many. She couldn’t let me have it, that time with you. She wouldn’t let me have it. So I called in some dues with Ghani, and he arranged it. The riot. It was a great fire. I lit some of it myself.’

  She broke off, staring at her feet in the sand, and clamped her jaw shut. Reflected lights gleamed in her eyes. For a moment I let myself imagine how those green eyes must’ve blazed with firelight as she’d watched the Palace burn.

  ‘I know about the States, too,’ I said after a while. ‘I know what happened there.’

  She looked at me quickly, reading my eyes.

  ‘Lisa,’ she said. I didn’t answer. Then, knowing instantly, as women do, what she couldn’t possibly know, she smiled. ‘That’s good—Lisa and you. You and Lisa. That’s … very good.’

  My expression didn’t change, and her smile faded as she looked down at the sand once more.

  ‘Did you kill anyone, Lin?’

  ‘When?’ I asked, not sure if she was talking about Afghanistan or the much-smaller war against Chuha and his gang.

  ‘Ever.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ she breathed, sighing again. ‘I wish …’

  She was silent again for a while. From somewhere beyond the deserted beach we heard the sounds of the festival: happy, roaring laughter rising over the blare of a brass band. Much closer, ocean music gushed onto the soft assenting shore, and the palms above us trembled in the cooling breeze.

  ‘When I went there … when I walked into his house, into the room where he was standing, he smiled at me. He was … actually … happy to see me. And for a split second, I changed my mind, and I thought it was … over. Then, I saw something else, right there in the middle of his smile … something dirty, and … he said … I knew you’d be back for more, one of these days … or something like that. And he … he kind of, he started looking around like he was making sure nobody was gonna bust in on us …’

  ‘It’s okay, Karla.’

  ‘When he saw the gun, it was worse, because he started … not begging … but apologising … and it was real clear, real clear, that he knew what he did to me … he knew … every part of it, and how bad it was. And that was much worse. And then he was dead. There wasn’t a lot of blood. I thought there would be. Maybe there was later. And I don’t remember the rest, until I was in the plane with Khader’s arm around me.’

  She was quiet. I leaned over to pick up a conical shell descending in spirals to a sharp, eroded point. I pressed it into my palm until it pierced the skin, and then threw it away across the rippled sand. When I looked at her again, I found that she was staring at me and frowning hard.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked bluntly.

  ‘I want to know why you never told me about Khaderbhai.’

  ‘Do you want it straight?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘I couldn’t trust you,’ she declared, looking away again. ‘That’s not exactly right—I mean, I didn’t know if I could trust you. I think … now—I know—I could’ve trusted you all along.’

  ‘Okay.’ My teeth were touching, and my lips didn’t move.

  ‘I tried to tell you. I tried to get you to stay with me in Goa. You know that.’

  ‘It would’ve made a difference,’ I snapped, but then sighed just as she had, and relaxed my tone. ‘It might’ve made a difference if you’d told me that you worked for him—that you recruited me for him.’

  ‘When I ran away … when I went to Goa, I was in a bad way. The Sapna thing—that was my idea. Did you know that?’

  ‘No. Jesus, Karla.’

  Her eyes narrowed as she read the angry disappointment in my face.

  ‘Not the killing part,’ she explained, and her expression was shocked, I think, to realise that I’d misunderstood what she’d said, and that I believed her capable of devising the Sapna killings. ‘That was all Ghani’s idea—his spin on it. They needed to get stuff in and out, through Bombay, and they needed help from people who didn’t want to give it. My idea was to create a common enemy—Sapna—and to get everybody working with us to defeat him. It was supposed to be done with posters, and graffiti, and some harmless bomb hoaxes—to make it seem like there was a dangerous, charismatic leader out there. But Ghani didn’t think it was scary enough. That’s why he started the killings …’

  ‘And you left … for Goa.’

  ‘Yeah. You know the very first place I heard about the killings—what Ghani was doing with my idea? It was at that Village in the Sky … that lunch you took me to. Your friends were talking about it. And it really shook me up that day. I stuck it out for a while, trying to stop it, somehow. But it was hopeless. And then Khader told me you were in jail—but you had to stay there until Madame Zhou did what he wanted her to do. And then he … he got me to work on the Pakistani, the young general. He was a contact of mine, and he liked me. So I … I did it. I worked him, while you were in there, until Khader got what he wanted. And then I just … quit. I’d had enough.’

  ‘But you went back to him.’

  ‘I tried to get you to stay with me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She was frowning, and seemed irritated by the question.

  ‘Why did you want me to stay with you?’

  ‘Isn’t that obvious?’

  ‘No. I’m sorry. It’s not. Did you love me, Karla? I’m not asking if you loved me like I loved you. I mean … did you love me at all? Did you love me at all, Karla?’

  ‘I liked you …’

  ‘Yeah …’

  ‘No, it�
��s true. I liked you, more than anyone else I knew. That’s a lot for me, Lin.’

  My jaw was locked tight, and I turned my head away from her. She waited for a few moments and then spoke again.

  ‘I couldn’t tell you about Khader. I couldn’t. It would’ve felt like I was betraying him.’

  ‘Betraying me was different, I guess …’

  ‘Fuck, Lin, it wasn’t like that. If you’d stayed with me, we both would’ve been out of that world, but even then I couldn’t have told you. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. You wouldn’t stay with me, so I never thought I’d see you again. Then I got a message from Khader saying you were in Gupta’s place, killing yourself with smack, and he needed me to help him get you out of there. That’s how I got back into it. That’s how I went back to him.’

  ‘I just don’t get it, Karla.’

  ‘What don’t you get?’

  ‘You worked for him, and Ghani, for how long—before the Sapna thing?’

  ‘About four years.’

  ‘So, you must’ve seen a lot of other stuff go down—you must’ve heard about it, at the very least. You’re working for the Bombay mafia, for fuck’s sake, or a goddamn branch of it. You’re working for one of Bombay’s biggest gangsters, like I was. You knew they killed people, before Ghani went psycho with his Sapna gang. Why … after all that, did you suddenly get freaked out with the Sapna thing? I don’t get it.’

  She’d been watching me closely. I knew she was clever enough to see that I was striking back at her with the questions, but her eyes told me that she saw more than that. Although I’d tried to hide it, I knew she’d picked up the scepticism barbed with righteous censure in my tone. When I finished she took a breath, and seemed about to speak, but then she paused as if reconsidering her reply.

  ‘You think I left them,’ she began at last, with a little frown of surprise, ‘and went to Goa because I wanted to be … what … forgiven, for what I’d done? Or for what I’d been part of? Is that it?’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘No. I wanted to be forgiven, and I still do, but not for that. I left them because I didn’t feel anything at all about the Sapna killings. I was stunned … and … sort of, freaked out, at first, that Ghani had turned the idea around so much. And I didn’t like it. I thought it was stupid. I thought it was unnecessary and it would get us all into trouble we didn’t need. And I tried to talk Khaderbhai out of it. I tried to get them to stop. But I didn’t feel anything about it, even when they killed Madjid. And I … I used to like him, you know? I liked old Madjid. He was the best of them, in a way. But I didn’t feel anything when he died. And I didn’t feel it, not even a bit, when Khader told me he had to leave you in jail and let you get beaten up. I liked you—more than I liked anyone else—but I didn’t feel bad or sorry. I kind of understood it—that it had to happen, and it was just bad luck that it was happening to you. I felt nothing. And that’s when it hit me—that’s when I knew I had to get away.’